


Pieces

by rustyliver



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:00:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29179881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rustyliver/pseuds/rustyliver
Summary: Dani, in death, at Bly manor.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Kudos: 23





	Pieces

She liked taking up space. It showed in the way she sat. Her arms spread -- elbow resting atop something of her shoulder's height. Some would think -- as you did -- that it was some show of territory. A stern, wordless request for distance. But you, like so many others, were wrong.

It could be a warning, sure, but it's not meant to stop people from coming closer. More of a sign, really, that spelled out,

"Not worth the trouble."

But it is. 

In fact, it's no trouble at all. 

The circumstances around your relationship with her are difficult but the relationship itself was easy. Hell, there'd been no introduction between you and her. There was only a moment -- before it, your life was absent of even the knowledge of her existence but once it had passed, she's in all of it like she had been there all along.

"The life we could have had, you know," you tell Death. 

No reaction. At least not any visible one. Death's face is hidden under the shadow of their hood. Still, a one-sided conversation with Death is a welcome relief when you spend most days with Viola. 

Death pushes their cup to you and you notice that it's empty. 

"Another?" you ask. Without waiting for an answer, you fill up the cup. 

"You ought not to be too pleased with yourself."

Sighing, you imagine Death rolling their eyes underneath that hood. 

"Who knows what is underneath that cloak?" Viola says. "Do you wonder why it never speaks? No tongue. No taste buds. No complaints."

"It's hard to find words when you've used them all up," you snipe back. 

Death speaks, but not in the way that you are used to, and while Viola will not admit it, she hears Death too. 

"How sweet," Viola sneers. "You wish to protect its feelings."

"Would you like to join us?" you ask Viola. The manor is huge. She could be spending her time elsewhere, but somehow, every time you turn around, she's there.

She is lonely too, you suppose. 

"No, thank you," Viola replies. 

You wish she would stop pretending like she isn't always lurking nearby. Viola isn't one of your favourite people either, but the circumstance in which she and you are trapped in does not necessarily allow for options when it comes to company. 

"You're leaving already?" you ask Death. 

Viola has disappeared from sight. 

Death -- quite possibly literally -- rises from their chair. Their cloak folds and unfolds in a way that a human-like entity would if they also had a long, loose cloak covering them, but, as Viola pointed out, who knows what is underneath all that fabric? There might be nothing at all, but you find it easier to interact with Death when you assume that they are a person. 

Death's cup is empty again, and you smile appreciatively at them. You never see them actually take a sip but that is the funny thing about being a ghost -- you can't always trust what you see and you can't approach everything you can't see with skepticism. As a ghost, all that matters is what you believe and for this, this very small thing; you choose to believe it to be true.

  
*** 

  
It's not just Viola. You lurk too.

But unlike her, you don't do it for silly pride. You only do it when Jamie appears at the manor. After she found you at the bottom of the lake, you're not sure if she would come back. You are so unsure that sometimes you think it must be a dream. But even in those moments, you hide from her -- afraid that if you show yourself, it would give her a reason to never leave. 

Viola, however, delights in showing herself to Jamie. You suspect her reason is similar to why you welcome Death with warmth when they visit. 

Boredom can make even the most hostile stranger seem friendly. 

Sometimes, Jamie is young. The lines around her eyes -- the ones that you left her with -- absent. She can easily convince you that she is not real. Convince you that you have tucked yourself away in a memory, one that you have constructed out of stories told to you by the real Jamie who is living her life out there in the real world. Still, you don't show yourself. 

You only peek out behind a tree as Jamie tries her best to ignore an old-timey lady ghost trying to engage her in a conversation. 

You'd recall conversations with Jamie about the manor. Jamie had worked there a number of years before and you wondered if she ever encountered its dead occupants. Given how many there were, you thought it strange that not one of them tried to interact with her. 

"A lack of imagination, I s'pose," was Jamie's answer, "and a lack of belief." 

"Really? Nothing at all?" you had asked. "No eerie breeze? Creaking from out of nowhere? What about a shadow in the corner of your eye?" 

Jamie had shrugged. "Maybe. But I'm sure my brain explained it away."

There was some wishful thinking on your part. You had hoped that when your life would reach its inevitable end, it won't be the absolute end of you and Jamie. 

Sometimes, Jamie is older. Older than when you left her. Older than when she begged you to pull and keep her with you at the bottom of the lake. 

Viola still causes her unease but the hostility and anger have dissipated. She would carry on a conversation with Viola like they are old acquaintances who see each other every five years or so. But the older Jamie seems less interested in you and more interested in Viola. She still asks about you but only after she has gone through a whole chapter of Viola's life, and she doesn't insist on an answer. She would walk away, seemingly satisfied with a non-answer. 

It hurts you, but who can blame her? When your whole life seems to happen all at once for you, she might have gone decades without you -- her memories of you now a faded scar, barely holding your shape. 

Sometimes, Jamie is as you left her. She is as you memorized her, sleeping soundly, unknowingly exhausted from the full day you had forced on her so she wouldn't wake as you tiptoed around the room, collecting the bare minimum you'd need to get yourself across an ocean, and a three-hour drive to Bly. 

Viola matches her anger. 

"I did not steal her!" Viola would yell back. "She invited me in. Took on my curse all on her own accord."

"Is that why you're here and she's not?" 

The desperation cannot be missed. Jamie is begging for you -- any sliver, no matter how small, of you -- to hold on to. You ache for her too, but showing yourself would be too cruel. She cannot live her life if she's anchored to her dead lover. 

You don't know why Viola, no matter how heated it gets, won't just say that you're lurking just behind Jamie. That if Jamie turns her head, she might just catch a glimpse of you. Of course, Viola won't tell you but you have an idea. After almost a decade and a half of having someone's soul inside of you, you get familiar with their motivations. With respect to your soul-mate, it's her anger. She is still angry after all these years. Even after she had regained most of her mental faculties. In Jamie she finds a sparring partner to match her rage. To match her in grief.

The real mystery is the reason you watch them. You don't have to. It upsets you. The world turns darker and you feel heavy like you hold the weight of the world inside you. 

Then it ends because even Viola has her limits. The world gets brighter and you feel only yourself. And your vision narrows -- focuses on your heart's desire. Next thing you know, you're sat on a flat above a pub. 

In life, you never had the chance to visit it. If you did, it was immediately forgotten. Everything moved so fast after the night when several lives -- and deaths -- were forever changed. There was the night, Hannah's funeral, Jamie's promise, and the goodbye to the Wingraves. Everything else was a blur.

Jamie doesn't see you. She is buried under stacks of printouts on the history of Bly, hand scribbling furiously into a notebook. On the wall, there are more papers, pinned in a nonsensical order. 

"Jamie," you call out to her. 

She doesn't hear you -- her ears plugged by a pair of headphones. 

That's best, you think. Now you can enjoy her company without the fear of ruining her. 

You can watch her for hours on end. 

That's how the shop got its first and only employee. You kept getting distracted by Jamie's ridiculously beautiful face. That smug, charming smile. And that cute butt. A few months later, it turned out to be a great business decision when it became increasingly easier for you to get lost to reflective surfaces. And now Jamie's here -- someone has to take care of the shop. 

You shake the image of long dead plants out of your mind. Jamie wouldn't. 

Jamie wouldn't have returned to Bly and stayed if she had not made the necessary arrangements. But what if it was you? What if it was you who got left behind? And Jamie's the one who--

"God," you blurt out. "No, Jamie."

She turns to you, like she heard what you said. 

"Go back to your life," you tell her.

She pulls the headphones off her head and walks towards you.

"Jamie," you call her name. "I'm not here."

At least not in the way that she deserves.

Jamie has reached the foot of the bed. With a blank stare, she throws herself onto you.

  
***

Big gestures were never your thing. When you were young, you thought that's how it should be. People come in pairs -- one who not only wears their heart on their sleeve, they point at it for the whole world to see and one who is a little more reserved and protective because they know they carry two hearts with them. But as you grew with Jamie, you learned that love doesn't divide exactly. 

Every morning, you wake up and take a piece. 

Some days, you're greedy so you take a huge piece. So huge that it scares you a little. You're afraid that you might have taken too much and there would be none left tomorrow. Yet, when tomorrow arrives, you find another piece waiting for you. 

Some days, you don't really think about it. It's just there and you feel safe. 

Then there are days when you're not sure if you have the strength to carry it at all. Those days, you remember that it is a two person job. It's okay to take a smaller piece. It's okay to let yourself be loved. It's okay to not feel as much as you want to. 

Jamie never forgets to keep her promise on those days. While it's your eyes that are wet and hers dry, you know her sorrow is deeper. She's scared too, but she is the one with the strength to take you in her arms and gently rub your back when you're too tired to lift your arms and hold her. So you just lie on your side, face buried in her chest, as she whispers sweet words in your ears. Words you can't hear because Viola's hunger is too loud.

Only when Jamie thinks that you have surrendered to the exhaustion and let yourself be taken by sleep that her body shakes, and the sweet words are replaced by fearful pleas. 

"Please don't leave," she tells you. "I need you."

That's your slice. You need to take it. But your limbs are frozen. You might as well be asleep. 

Even with you supposedly unaware, Jamie fights against the urge to completely break apart. No, that comes later. She takes a deep breath -- a difficult task when one's nose is stuffed with mucous. With one determined swallow, her body stills. She rests her chin on your head and hugs you tighter.

She hums. No particular tune at first. It's one of the things that you learned about Jamie a little later in your relationship. She hums when she is unsettled. The external voice seems to quiet the troubling voices inside her head. Or at least, it makes it harder for her hear them. 

Eventually, a song comes together but it shifts quickly to another. So it's hard to say what each song is. Still, oddly, it comforts you, and intermittently through the night, you catch yourself nodding off. It's unlikely that you can fully control how deeply you sleep, but you try the best you can not to fall too deep. You think it's one of the ways that Viola can come out. 

But Jamie's voice is soothing. It lulls you into a false sense of security -- as if it would satiate Viola's hunger somehow -- and the panic you feel whenever your eyes blink open from sleep becomes less alarming each time. 

Until the last time, that is. 

Jamie has stopped humming. 

When you see where your hands are, the panic returns tenfold. They're not squeezed tightly around Jamie's neck, and you have to ask yourself if this is the before or after a heinous act. You take her wrist to check for a pulse. It takes you awhile to actually feel it, even as you see Jamie's chest move in concert with her breath. 

The moment you've been dreading since that night at Bly manor has arrived. 

It's time to leave.

***

  
On your death day, Death came to Bly to welcome you. You asked them if they were taking Viola too. When they told you no as Viola growled her protest, you politely declined Death's invitation and asked them if they would stay for some snack and tea. Ever since then, it had become a routine between you and Death. 

It's not that you don't feel bad about it -- you haven't turned someone down so many times since Eddie -- but the pressure to comply is noticeably absent. Death shows up, you say no, then the two of you sit down for some tea. 

Death is a good listener. The experience is not easy to describe, especially not with words since words are not involved, but if you had to try -- the closest experience that you can compare it to is…it's like writing in your diary at age twelve. There is that same sense of safety that allows you to pour your heart out to them.

"Am I crazy for even considering it?" you ask them. 

A wedding invitation arrived this morning. By mistake, if you had to guess. The recipient is unnamed. Only the address was written on the envelope. The card inside is the same. The space for the guest's name is left blank.

It seems Little Flora is all grown up. You're so happy for her and you want to see it. You want to see the woman she's become. Miles would be there too. And Owen. Even if you're anchored to this place that refuses to abide causality -- where you can see those dear to you all the time -- you have missed them. Even Henry too. 

"Two things can be true at the same time," you tell Death. "Of course I want to see her. Doesn't make me want to see everyone else any less. At the wedding, I can see all of them. Do you know how long it's been since--" You laugh. "You're right. I don't know."

You try to hide your desperation. Your nerves. 

A few nights ago, you found yourself sitting next to Jamie on a porch. She was the oldest you have seen her. Out of habit, you reached for the hands resting atop her lap. 

"Poppins," she murmured. 

Immediately, you realized your mistake but you found yourself incapable of letting go. It felt like the first time in ages since you had experienced warm hands. This delightful discovery filled you with greed. 

Then the door opened.

"Won't you come in, my love? I don't want you to catch a cold." 

You had a strong urge to steal Jamie away. Hide her somewhere only you know. Keep her warm hands to yourself. 

"Is it?" Jamie asked. 

"What is?"

"It's quite warm," Jamie said. 

A chuckle. "I'll get you a blanket." 

It was what you wanted and yet, when you realized it had come true, you never wanted something less.

With a simple reminder, Death pulls you out of the memory. You've been to the wedding. You were at the rehearsal dinner and you listened as Jamie told a mixed group of old friends and strangers the story of you and her. 

Jamie held her audience captive, which you found surprising considering how long winded the story was. But as you listened, it dawned on you that she needed it. Desperate even for it. It seemed like she had kept it in for a long time and her only catharsis would be to let it all out. 

You sat through the whole thing even though it made you feel so exposed to hear a huge part of your life to be told to mostly strangers. Even Flora and Miles seemed like strangers. Not that seeing them didn't fill you with immense pride but they were no longer the children you knew. Whatever image of you that still remains in their memory must be too fuzzy to be meaningful. 

At the end of it, you followed Jamie back to her hotel room. 

Silly woman.

She left the door open even though it is not her home. Anyone could just walk in as she slept. 

You so wanted to meet her in her dreams but the open door kept you out. All night, you stood by her side. Just watching her. Lost in her beautiful, ridiculous face. 

  
*** 

  
In death, time isn't a straight line. It curves and bends and loops. Rolls and collapses. Warps. 

Once you have understood this, time becomes easier to navigate. No longer do you dwell in painful moments, and if you do accidentally stumble into one of them, you can easily slip out. Mostly, you find pathways to Jamie. 

That first night the two of you had together. When you can barely tear yourself away from her. 

In bed that one time, when she read some book about ancient plants while you watched TV, her legs tangled up in yours. There were many nights like that. So they are the easiest to find. 

But there are times when it can't be helped. You follow a path and end up slipping. When you pick yourself back up, you're in a moment you don't recognize.

Jamie's there. She always is. 

Part of you wants to stick around but your gut twists whenever you end up here. Nothing sinister, you don't think. The discomfort feels more like a state of unreadiness. 

You've been in this moment many times. Hesitated so many times.

With Jamie standing right in front of you, arm stretched forward, palm open, how could you leave her? 

She never speaks. Not a word. Only smiles. 

So different from that final moment. When she begged for you to take her. 

In this moment, she seems content to just wait. 

"What do I do?" you ask her. 

You don't know if she will answer. You have never spoken to her either. All you do, during those other times, is to wait quietly for the moment to pass. 

"What do you want to do?" she asks.

Chuckling, you shake your head. "You can't…do that."

"I told you," Jamie says. "There will be other nights."

It's unbelievable how such simple words could melt away your fears. 

You take her hand. 

"You promise?" you ask.

Jamie pulls you in, presses her lips against yours. 

To you, it's a good enough answer but she repeats it as you reluctantly pull away from her,

"I promise." 


End file.
